Django SQL Explorer

Django SQL Explorer is inspired by Stack Exchange's Data Explorer and is designed to make the flow of data between people in your company fast, simple, and confusion-free. Quickly write and share SQL queries in a clean, usable query builder, preview the results in the browser, share links to download CSV files, and keep the information flowing baby!

django-sql-explorer is MIT licensed, and pull requests are welcome!

A view of a query

Viewing all queries

Quick access to DB schema info

Basic visualization

Features

• Security

  • Let's not kid ourselves - this tool is all about giving people access to running SQL in production. So if that makes you nervous (and it should) - you've been warned. Explorer makes an effort to not allow terrible things to happen, but be careful! It's recommended you use the EXPLORER_CONNECTION_NAME setting to connect SQL Explorer to a read-only database role.
  • Explorer supports two different permission checks for users of the tool. Users passing the EXPLORER_PERMISSION_CHANGE test can create, edit, delete, and execute queries. Users who do not pass this test but pass the EXPLORER_PERMISSION_VIEW test can only execute queries. Other users cannot access any part of Explorer. Both permission groups are set to is_staff by default and can be overridden in your settings file.
  • Enforces a SQL blacklist so destructive queries don't get executed (delete, drop, alter, update etc). This is not bulletproof and it's recommended that you instead configure a read-only database role, but when not possible the blacklist provides reasonable protection.

• Easy to get started

  • Built on Django's ORM, so works with Postgresql, Mysql, and Sqlite.
  • Small number of dependencies.
  • Just want to get in and write some ad-hoc queries? Go nuts with the Playground area.

• Parameterized Queries

  • Use $$foo$$ in your queries and Explorer will build a UI to fill out parameters. When viewing a query like 'SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=$$id$$', Explorer will generate UI for the 'id' parameter.
  • Parameters are stashed in the URL, so you can share links to parameterized queries with colleagues

• Schema Helper

  • /explorer/schema/ renders a list of your Django apps' table and column names (and types) that you can refer to while writing queries. Apps are excludable from this list so users aren't bogged down in tons of irrelevant tables. See settings documentation below for details.
  • This is available quickly as a sidebar helper while composing queries (see screenshot)
  • Supports many_to_many relations as well.
  • Quick search for the tables/django models you are looking for. Just start typing!

• Template Columns

  • Let's say you have a query like 'select id, email from user' and you'd like to quickly drill through to the profile page for each user in the result. You can create a "template" column to do just that.
  • Just set up a template column in your settings file:

  EXPLORER_TRANSFORMS = [('user', '<a href="https://yoursite.com/profile/{0}/">{0}</a>')]

  • And change your query to 'SELECT id AS "user", email FROM user'. Explorer will match the "user" column alias to the transform and merge each cell in that column into the template string. Cool!

• Simple Charts

  • Using the Charted JS library from Medium, you can view results as either a table (default) or a chart. Just click on the "chart" tab.

• Query Logs

  • Explorer will save a snapshot of every query you execute so you can recover lost ad-hoc queries, and see what you've been querying.
  • This also serves as cheap-and-dirty versioning of Queries.

• Stable

  • 95% according to coverage...for what that's worth. Just install factory_boy and run manage.py test
  • Battle-tested in production every day by the ePantry team.

• Power tips

  • On the query listing page, focus gets set to a search box so you can just navigate to /explorer and start typing the name of your query to find it.
  • Quick search also works after hitting "Show Schema" on a query view.
  • Command+Enter and Ctrl+Enter will execute a query when typing in the SQL editor area.
  • Hit the "Format" button to format and clean up your SQL (this is non-validating -- just formatting).
  • Use the Query Logs feature to share one-time queries that aren't worth createing a persistent query for. Just run your SQL in the playground, then navigate to /logs and share the link (e.g. /explorer/play/?querylog_id=2428)
  • Set env vars for EXPLORER_TOKEN_AUTH_ENABLED=TRUE and EXPLORER_TOKEN=<SOME TOKEN> and you have an instant data API. Just:

  curl --header "X-API-TOKEN: <TOKEN>" https://www.your-site.com/explorer/<QUERY_ID>/csv

Install

Requires Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.4. Requires Django 1.6.7 or higher. In theory Explorer should work fine with earlier versions of Django, but this has not been tested. South migrations exist for Django 1.6 and earlier, but by default Explorer uses 1.7 migrations.

Install with pip from github:

pip install django-sql-explorer

Add to your installed_apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = ( ..., 'explorer', ... )

Add the following to your urls.py (all Explorer URLs are restricted to staff only per default):

url(r'^explorer/', include('explorer.urls')),

Run syncdb to create the tables:

python manage.py syncdb

You can now browse to https://yoursite/explorer/ and get exploring! However note it is highly recommended that you also configure Explorer to use a read-only database connection via the EXPLORER_CONNECTION_NAME setting.

Using South Migrations

Explorer by default uses the new migrations in Django 1.7 to manage database schema. However South migrations also exist in the south_migrations folder, for those still using Django 1.6 or earlier. To use South migrations, For South support, customize the SOUTH_MIGRATION_MODULES setting like so:

SOUTH_MIGRATION_MODULES = { 'explorer': 'explorer.south_migrations', }

Migrations were introduced in version 0.5. So if you are upgrading from an earlier version of explorer and using South, you'll have to run the following to convert Explorer to a South application:

python manage.py migrate explorer 0001 --fake

You can then run the rest of the migrations as usual.

python manage.py migrate explorer

If you are installing Explorer for the first time, you can just follow the normal installation instructions.

Dependencies

An effort has been made to keep the number of dependencies to a minimum.

Back End

Name	Version	License
sqlparse*	0.1.11	BSD
Factory Boy	2.4.1	MIT

• Used for SQL formatting only

Front End

Name	Version	License
Twitter Boostrap	3.3.0	MIT
jQuery	2.1.1	MIT
jQuery Cookie	1.4.1	MIT
Underscore	1.7.0	MIT
Codemirror	4.7.0	MIT
floatThead	1.2.8	MIT
charted	0.1.1	MIT
list.js	1.1.1	MIT

Most are served from cdnjs, except for Charted, which is served locally.

Factory Boy is needed if you'd like to run the tests, which can you do easily:

python manage.py test --settings=explorer.tests.settings

and with coverage:

coverage run --source='.' manage.py test --settings=explorer.tests.settings

Settings

Setting	Description	Default
EXPLORER_SQL_BLACKLIST	Disallowed words in SQL queries to prevent destructive actions.	('ALTER', 'RENAME ', 'DROP', 'TRUNCATE', 'INSERT INTO', 'UPDATE', 'REPLACE', 'DELETE', 'ALTER', 'CREATE TABLE', 'SCHEMA', 'GRANT', 'OWNER TO')
EXPLORER_SQL_WHITELIST	These phrases are allowed, even though part of the phrase appears in the blacklist.	('CREATED', 'DELETED')
EXPLORER_DEFAULT_ROWS	The number of rows to show by default in the preview pane.	100
EXPLORER_SCHEMA_EXCLUDE_APPS	Don't show schema for these packages in the schema helper.	('django.contrib.auth', 'django.contrib.contenttypes', 'django.contrib.sessions', 'django.contrib.admin')
EXPLORER_CONNECTION_NAME	The name of the Django database connection to use. Ideally set this to a connection with read only permissions	None # Which means use the 'default' connection
EXPLORER_PERMISSION_VIEW	Callback to check if the user is allowed to view and execute stored queries	lambda u: u.is_staff
EXPLORER_PERMISSION_CHANGE	Callback to check if the user is allowed to add/change/delete queries	lambda u: u.is_staff
EXPLORER_TRANSFORMS	List of tuples like [('alias', 'Template for {0}')]. See features section of this doc for more info.	[]
EXPLORER_RECENT_QUERY_COUNT	The number of recent queries to show at the top of the query listing.	10
EXPLORER_GET_USER_QUERY_VIEWS	A dict granting view permissions on specific queries of the form {userId:[queryId, ...], ...}	{}
EXPLORER_TOKEN_AUTH_ENABLED	Bool indicating whether token-authenticated requests should be enabled. See "Power Tips", above.	False
EXPLORER_TOKEN	Access token for query results.	CHANGEME